


Whose Deepness Doth Entice

by MumblingSage



Category: Historical RPF, SHAKESPEARE William - Works, Will (TV 2017)
Genre: (writer's blocked but not cockblocked amirite?), Blasphemy, First Time, Let Billy Shakes Be Bisexual!, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Name Puns, Religious Imagery and Symbolism, Writer's Block, sort of an attempt at sex magic, too nice to be hatesex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 08:52:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12128925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MumblingSage/pseuds/MumblingSage
Summary: Men destined for heaven didn’t write very good plays, anyway.The moment came when either of them could have broken the kiss—and should have, if it were going to be something that could be easily forgotten—and neither of them did.





	Whose Deepness Doth Entice

…Only to wonder at unlawful things  
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits,  
To practise more than heavenly power permits.

**_-[The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Faustus_\(play\))_** _,_ Epilogue

 

If this be magic, let it be an art  
Lawful as eating.

-  ** _[A Winter's Tale,](http://shakespeare.mit.edu/winters_tale/winters_tale.5.3.html) _** Act V, Scene III

 

The moment came, the fraction of a moment when either of them could have broken the kiss—and should have, if it were going to be something that could be easily passed over, recovered from, forgotten—and neither of them did. Even as he failed to, Kit pushed himself up from the table. The gesture’s force carried them both as Will refused to let go of him. Disorientation ended with them sprawled on the floor. Will, beneath him, still kept hold of Kit’s shirt, tugging it with such seeming desperation that the collar pulled against the back of his neck.

He parted his lips, but startled when Kit accepted the invitation as if the sweep of his tongue was a mouthful of too-hot mulled wine.

His grip slackened so that Kit pulled back.

“What do you want?” he asked, softer now.

“I want…” His tongue darted across his lips as though checking for blisters.

Kit waited, his fingers sliding over Will’s chest but not wandering lower. At any moment he expected Will might grab his hand and push it away, revealing he had after all misunderstood that gleam in his eyes as their bodies pressed close on the table. That when he spoke of the conflict between who he wanted to be and what he must be, he’d meant something much less…interesting.

Did he even realize how much the things he admitted to wanting were in contradiction? Fame _and_ freedom? What other paradoxes did he contain?

“I don’t want…”

Beads rolled under Kit’s fingers—a necklace, or maybe, if it wasn’t kept in the pockets of the jacket he’d draped over the chair, his Catholic rosary. If he knew that it was safer to carry with him than to hide in his room where it could be discovered by any prying eyes.

That dangerous religion—Kit watched him weigh it, the faith that would see him damned for this. Equally, the faith that would have seen him drawn and quartered. Not much to choose from (why, then, did Kit still envy him a little?). It had been, he acknowledged, unfair to call him a coward when he couldn’t take any step without risking some manner of martyrdom.

Unfair to call him a coward when he’d already had to lure the man from one path to martyrdom this night (that was him, luring, always the serpent, never the dove). And he may have damned his soul already for it, depending on how Heaven assigned the fault for Baxter’s death. Mostly Kit’s, surely, for he doubted the Divine judge would give the same value to aesthetic considerations as he did or forgive the reassuring deception with which he dissuaded Will from interfering to try to right the matter. But what would It make of Will’s willingness to be deceived?

More or less than It would make of his willingness to be kissed, petted, even now lured down other paths to destruction?

Will’s fingers wrapped around Kit’s wrist, arresting the movement.

“I want,” he said, and when he rose up and kissed Kit instead of answering, that in itself was his answer. Wordless, beyond all words, which for such as them was nearly the same as being beyond thought.

Not to think, or for what he thought of not to matter—to be a shadow or a dream, to seem as if it happened in another country, or to someone dead— to be _free_ of the matter if only for an hour’s time.

It was the same reason Kit wanted to write.

Will’s mouth opened hungrily, as if the kiss held something that could make him immortal, and he rose to meet Kit with such force that he overturned them. Shoulders to the floorboards, Kit finally let his hand drop lower, finding him heavy at the join of his legs.

“And is this thy will?” He couldn’t keep down a smirk at the pun, but Will smiled, too. The uncertainty in his dancing eyes was now not a question of _whether,_ but _what._

“You know…what to do?” It wasn’t truly a question.

“I am an expert.”  

He drew the hem of Will’s shirt from his trousers, feeling breath hitch in the flesh under his knuckles. Fingers curled at the nape of his neck and played with strands of his hair.

“And I am your willing apprentice.”

“My apprentice sodomite.” He pulled Will’s shirt higher, forcing his arms to lift so he could strip the garment over his head. It left his hair in tempting disarray, which only grew worse at Kit combed through it. Will shivered as his touch explored his shoulders and spine, even as his skin glowed with their proximity to the fire. Kit realized at least some of that shivering was from laughter, light and startled.

But it wasn’t with mockery that Will said, “Apprentice sodomites. Oh brave new world, that has such beings in it!”

Nor was it entirely in mockery that Kit drawled, “That’s rather good. You should save it for a play.”

“Someday, perhaps.” His touch came around and stroked Kit’s throat, fingertips gentle and searching. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Give me a line from your play.”

“I have—” He stopped himself from saying _No play,_ because Will already knew that. Only a line. He should be able to find that much; lines flowed out of him whenever he had an audience to dazzle, and all that could stop them—fittingly enough—was a quill in hand. Which he didn’t have now.

He let his mouth brush close across the other man’s skin, feeling another shiver at his lips as he invoked, “ _This magic, that will charm thy soul to hell._ ”

That wasn’t bad, in his measured opinion, though he was glad he murmured the words in so low a voice that Will didn’t seem to understand them all. If something else in the room might have—if saying the words _could_ cast the spell—well, how interesting that would be. For his part, Kit didn’t fear hellfire. Or anything.

With much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth and not much digging in of heels, there were those who gave in to the blandishments of Satan. There were those who would rather put their trust in Beelzebub than simply despair in God. It seemed too definite a faith for Kit. The worst eternal torment he found himself capable of believing in was the loss of heaven, the Divine face turning away for Its own inscrutable reasons. A deprivation of love—even then, he’d always preferred the love of man to love of God.

And men destined for heaven didn’t write very good plays, anyway.

“Will you use that, then?” Will asked.

Kit shrugged. “Some things are better contained in stories…and said in voices other than one’s own.”

“My voices—” Will stopped, shook his head.

If he had a good angel, hounding him to repentance, barking from the corners, it was time the bugger fell silent. _Or perhaps the fellow has an evil angel, wooing him to other ends…_ An interesting conceit. He could see how it might work onstage, but what story could encompass it?

He nudged Will back, unthreaded his belt, and started to pull away his trousers. Will cooperated, but as he stretched out beside Kit, naked except for a few necklaces and bracelets, he cast his eyes down. Kit waited once more, not impatient. As always, it would no doubt be interesting—if not equally alarming—to see which way he would jump.

“I’m married,” he said.

Kit wasn’t sure how to dignify that with a reply. Will had spoken almost with an air of disbelief, but flippancy seemed unwise. And his most sincere answers would all be taken as flippant. He wasn’t about to explain the understanding he and Tommy had.

All his clever observations about quantity balanced with quality were washed away as Will murdered words between them in a kiss.

Kit drank in the taste of wine from his mouth before starting down the length of his body. Sweat salted his warm skin, and even his palms on Kit’s shoulders and upper arms felt slick with it. His hold was too firm to slip, though. It tightened when Kit reached his cock.

Kit licked slowly, savoring the bittersweet flavor and the way he made Will twist. A blush spread across Will’s chest before his eyes. He closed them as he wrapped his lips around the head, took him in deeper to the hilt. Crisp hair curled against his mouth. He pulled back, then accepted all his length again, hearing the breaths above him growing ragged.

A noise broke from Will’s throat, not in any way articulate.

“Well, Master Shakespeare?” His own voice was roughened, and he shook back a fall of hair from his face that would have hidden his smile from Will. “I’ve heard you’re an inventor of new words. Do any come to mind now?”

Just a whimper, it seemed, at the heat of Kit’s mouth so _close_ and yet not to the purpose.

“And I thought love always makes those eloquent that have it,” he continued, as if to himself. He’d been rolling that line around for a poem about two Greek lovers, ill-fated—weren’t they all? Their poem was currently as doomed to incompletion as they were to parting and death, as doomed as everything he’d set to paper. In their case it was something of a mercy, since he’d abandoned them happily in bed with each other. Since he couldn’t escape it, he enjoyed the irony. Almost as much as he enjoyed teasing Will with incompletion.

Still—

_The words were not yet invented that could save thee, Marlowe, and they’re not about to be now._ Not from this Papist upstart crow and new-fledged sodomite who wanted the world and seemed on the cusp of having it, if his angels and his sins didn’t scare him off. With the right word a writer could reshape the nature of things—wasn’t that the idea of Scripture?—but first one must recognize the right word when it fell dripping to his tongue. One must first know what the nature of the world _was._

And the idea that this upstart crow from Warwickshire (and apprentice sodomite, _not_ to forget that) who’d had to be lured away from handing himself over for interrogation and eventual burial in quarters could somehow see more of the world’s secrets that Kit Marlowe, well. That was probably a sign of even deeper confusion.

Kit replaced the ghost of touch that was his breath with a lap of tongue that was hardly more substantial, followed by brief kisses along Will’s length—firm to the point of sharpness, almost nipping. Not to be vicious, precisely. But it wasn’t until another whimpering plea, followed by Will’s thighs straining desperately to meet him, that he had mercy.

This was, however strange to think, a mission of mercy—not just for that aching cockstand now taken deeper, not so far as to cut off breath but commanding Kit’s attention satisfactorily. Those inarticulate sounds had their own music. It would have been a pity and a waste to leave a man like this forever cut off from his full self, his true nature. About time someone… _held up a mirror to it, isn’t that how it goes?_

His nature was growing wilder with a mixture of desperation and perhaps a growing self-assuredness. His fingers twisted in Kit’s hair. His grip was on the long ends, loose enough to avoid pulling even when each thrust moved Kit’s head with it.  It was nothing Kit couldn’t tame if he cared to, but he had never cared much for _tame._

As he’d reflected, it could be interesting to see which way Will would jump. If also alarming, should it be into a trap. _Master Shakespeare, thou art so lucky in me._ To have fallen into his hands and not some crueler spider’s web. The thought of what webs he might fly to next made Kit’s head ache far more than the sudden sharp twinge as Will’s hips lifted from the floor, his hold tightening until the muscles corded in his arms.

_But that’s what this is supposed to do. To keep him from flying anywhere. Keep him distracted. Keep him alert to finer desires, better aims than some wasted martyrdom._ An unpleasant emptiness still opened under Kit’s lungs when he remembered the man walking away, answering his flippant suggestion to turn himself in with a madman’s resolve. (Or a Catholic’s? Why, again, did some part of Kit _envy_ him?)

It would be a mercy and no martyrdom to hold him back from other action for a few hours, until, as Kit had reassured him, matters resolved themselves. While the resolution might not be to the credit of their souls—Will could seek out his hidden priest and enjoy that sacrament of absolution if he was alive and free, not so if he was dead. It was just a matter of waiting things out.

Patiently.

_Lente, lente currite, noctis equi._ The second time he’d thought of something from Ovid this night, after his hopeless lovers, though Kit couldn’t see how a plea for the horses of the night to run slowly could fit into a play. It could be given to some mating pair, of course, but that seemed too obvious.

And Kit Marlowe was not about to become _sentimental_ with Will Shakespeare’s cock half in his throat.

At a familiar warning saltiness, he pulled back, easing Will’s grip from his hair with fingers to his wrists. “Let’s not hurry.”

“No…” Will sat up, breathing heavily. His hands braced on the floor, his arms bent but tension-corded to his shoulders. A deep, ripe pink like wilting roses shaded his cheeks, spotting like bruises and matching the shade shadowed proudly between his thighs. A clear droplet dewed from the head and slipped down the length. To be abandoned in a state like this could drive some men temporarily mad, but that pitch of desire could also embolden where unfamiliarity or shame could turn timid.

Without any sign of timidity, Will closed the space between them and grasped Kit’s shirt, drawing it over his head. His hands traced bare skin, exploratory, unhurried and unhesitant, slick with sweat but not clammy—so warm, in fact, that they made Kit shiver. He let himself be eased back onto the cushion made of their discarded clothing. More consideration than he’d shown Will so far, he thought ruefully as his own hands stroked the other man’s back and felt where skin had been roughened by the floorboards.

That unwonted gentleness continued as Will’s fingers found and removed belt, boots, breeches…then eyes ran over him as well as hands, gliding with an expression that wasn’t as simple as bafflement or lust or even the mixture of the two he had expected.

Beneath them both, his heart pounded with the force of cracking thunder. At last he wound his fingers through Will’s hair and guided his head down, continuing this strange mission of mercy. Feeling his mouth move meltingly down his frame, Kit smirked to himself at the strange arts necessity found out. Strange to Will, at least, who practiced his art with enthusiasm if not initial talent.

When he came to it, he licked, in turn with the flat and the tip of his tongue and even with the sides, curling and wrapping as if sampling a new delicacy he was unsure of—as if shaping new words to describe it. The strokes became longer, the lapping more firm and almost regular. The interruptions to his rhythm were so brief he may not have noticed or intended them. Well, Kit had not exactly impressed on him the virtue of consistency.  The breath rushed from his nose across Kit’s hair and flesh, a sigh of surprise and concentration.

He looked down, seeking Will’s eyes, but caught only a sweep of lashes before he let his own heavy lids fall shut. Inexpert as this touch was, it was easy to give over to. He stretched out his arms—the gesture only half-consciously blasphemous, nails digging in to the gaps between boards, head fallen back, heart straining in his throat and breath growing tight as the urgent power coiled beneath his stomach. Will added his fingers, tracing veins along the shaft and looping the thumb around Kit’s base to guide the angle. His experiments, however unorthodox, were no failures. It would be difficult—there, at last, came the brush of his lips—for anything he did to fail.

It felt _inspiring._ Inspiring to what end, Kit couldn’t say. To none, really: purposeless, aimless, fruitless. That was the glory of it, the near-identical opposite of the release he found in writing; a release from the fact that he could no longer write. To be wordless. To be animal more than man, and to make the same of Will, who for all his aptitude couldn’t coin a word or compose a line in this state. Nor did he need to. He moved his audience far more directly.

“There’s a sort of witchcraft in your lips,” Kit murmured, then tried, and failed, to bite back a laugh.

Will lifted his head just far enough to say, “You should fit that in a play.”

“I won’t.” He laughed again; though not with humor, it was its own sort of release. “I’m not writing. You take it—” _Damn thee,_ he thought, but trapped the word in time and ended instead, “—swive thee.”

“Wilt thou?”

“Oh.” How much his senses had been disarrayed that he hadn’t even noticed the double meaning. He considered it now. “Why not?”

He looked down at Will, who nodded. If anything, his expression appeared relieved. With his lack of experience, he might not have felt capable of taking on a more active role in his apprenticeship. But when Kit rose suddenly, leaning towards him, almost crowding him—a moment of aggression born from lingering frustration and growing lust both, not to mention the wingbeat of curiosity, still interested to see him jump—Will kept his ground, and with lips turned red and wet he met Kit’s mouth and gave him the taste of himself.

Kit led him to the table, eventually. It would be kinder than the floor, if still no bed of roses (and then, as Tom had once remarked, even in his most florid love poem there lurked a share of thorns). Given the sorts of things this table was used for, it shouldn’t be hard to find—there. He pulled closer the vial of almond oil and let the fragrant slickness pool in his hand. He rubbed his fingers through, warming it, and ran his slickened grip the length of Will’s cock as a sort of reward, encouragement, mercy perhaps.

He nudged one of Will’s knees up, spreading his legs wide at the edge of the table. As Kit stepped between them, an expression crossed Will’s face, nothing so definite as uncertainty.

He caught Will’s hand from his shoulder—the right hand, the cut one, and as he examined the healing injury Kit toyed with a reference to another more famous wound to the palm. But it took a particular cast of mind to be comforted by blasphemy, and he had no reason to expect this Catholic to have it. Instead, he simply placed a kiss there, half-mockingly as he did nearly everything, and half confused at his own tenderness. Will’s fingers curved against his jaw, stroking the pulse that fluttered beneath.

He gathered more oil and started in. Slowly, patiently, mindful from his own experience of the time it could take even willing flesh to yield. And then when it did, he recognized Will’s moan, the rattle of surprise deeper in his throat.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?”

He didn’t answer. A moment later, as Kit turned his wrist—“ _Christ!_ ”

So he may have misjudged the tolerance of blasphemy. But as quickly as if it were his cue, Kit said, “I’ve been called that.”

Will laughed incredulously, either at his words or at the twisting spread of his fingers, or else both.

“At first by my parents, who chose the name _Christ_ opher—”

“Kit,” Will said, perhaps simply stating his preference. Yet hearing his name on those swollen lips sent a jolt through him.

Lifting fingers that had been white-knuckled on the edge of the table, Will grasped the back of his head and pulled him down, stopping any further words. Kit’s heart was too hardened to repent any of the ones that had come before. His heart, and not only that.

His cock rubbed against Will’s thigh, pressure he wanted to chase but couldn’t yet give in to. Will’s pressed his stomach like iron from the forge. Still held in the kiss, Kit eased his slicked hand free of him, reached between their bodies, and guided himself home.

Patience again, but he entered easily, all reluctance caressed and oiled away. Will’s nails dug into his scalp, his teeth nipped Kit’s stroking tongue, but his other hand gripped Kit’s arse as if to pull him closer and made it clear these teases of violence were encouragement more than resistance. Kit’s inclination was to take such treatment that way whenever he could, in any case—another thing to give himself over to. As he moved deeper with each stroke, he met the kiss more hungrily. The sharp tug to the roots of his hair when he turned to nibble along Will’s jawline brought stars to his eyes.

He felt blood pound within the veins under his lips in the same rush that carried his hips forward with a snap. And again, without intention, just sensation, aches turning sweet, Will trembling around and beneath him, both of them wordless, the world dissolving. As if purified in an embrace that extinguished thought. As if—

“Wait.”  Will’s hand tightened on his upper arm. “Wait.”

Kit went still. “What is it?”

Will moved, pulling free, but before Kit could regret the loss the other man’s hands were hard on him, turning him into place. Will settled straddling him, then—with a blush and a tongue wetting his lips, not quite hidden in the shadow of his hair—brought him in again. And this, _this_ was bliss. Pinned under Will’s weight, the boards of the table not rough enough for splinters but still rasping at his back with each stroke. Not crushed, but overwhelmed. Lost. It was difficult to get much leverage in this position, more being ridden than riding. Again his arms spread wide. He let himself be transfixed.

Will didn’t kiss him now, head thrown back in his own experience, and Kit wouldn’t ask him too. He reached between them and stroked Will’s hard cock until slickness welled under his fingers. He made Will come just a few moments before he did. It was a flash of heat and light, the other man’s shadow cast over him from the fire behind his shoulders, and a taste of salt and an uncurling emptiness that rose when all else passed. Not desolate. It was the feeling, he thought, of freedom.

Will fell across him, breathing heavily into the hollow where his neck met his shoulder. Kit circled an arm around his waist, closed his eyes completely, and the wordless emptiness held them a little longer.

Which was good, because he didn’t know what to say. A player who had failed to rehearse his part, a would-be sorcerer struck dumb when something appeared from a flash of smoke within his chalk circle.

A line would come to him, or it would not.

There was no special urgency to it. Will remained as silent as if danger lay in words, his mouth eloquent only as it passed lightly across Kit’s skin. And there would be no other audience.

After all, this was not the kind of thing one wrote about.

**Author's Note:**

> So I don’t know how to moderate a drinking game through AO3, but if you spot a reference, indicated or not, scream in my inbox and I’ll give you a high five. And tell you how smart you are, because I'm pretty sure some of my references are unintentional (when you're dealing with a guy who invented 25% of Modern English and then the guy who both wrote Dr. Faustus and coined the phrase "a bed of roses," you're bound to lose track). Most of the dirty puns are deliberate, though. My heart is too hardened to repent of them.


End file.
